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Nothing, keep them as dwarves.

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Eastern Dwarves

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Total Members Voted: 2

[Enemy post]

What if you call them by a mixture? Dao sword, talwar sabre, yari spear, and so on.

[Grimlocke]

Translating them literally would just end you up with something like 'sword, sword, axe, spear, etc'. Naginata apparently means 'mowing hatchet' which sounds fun, but doesn't really bring to mind the right image.

Descriptive names can work, but might end you up with a bunch of weapons all called just 'sword'. Making them detailed descriptive names is also generally not a great idea, as you end up with really long and silly names like 'curved pole-mounted sword'.

Enemy Post's idea could work, beside that all I think of to make things look a bit more at home is to give entities weapons from a single culture, for instance by separating them between Japanese, Chinese, Nepalese, Central-Asian and Indo-Persian stuff. Then you can name things like 'japanese spear' or 'mongolian saber'. Alternately, if you want to avoid real-world names entirely you could go for 'islander spear' or 'nomad saber'. Not sure how you can force the islanders to actually settle only islands though.

Alternately, you can just embrace the messiness and add some in-game descriptions through dfhack.

[Sorgklaan]

Just a quick update.

First the weapon names, I'm just going to leave them as they are for now, I've been thinking and I think it's best if I alter them how I need them as I go, no reason to change them immediately.

My friend and I finished the Mongolian inspired civilization and it's certainly interesting, of course since mounts and whatnot are really limited, I had to compromise. I want them to be very threatening, very strong siegers with a lot of physical strength.  They are both very powerful in melee combat and with bows, though their weapon variety is low. I wanted to give them martial trance, but instead I gave them a high anger propensity with the idea of them entering Enraged more often.

The naga are sort of rough, with them being the first one I did, I feel like I need to go back and redo them, because I'm not really comfortable with where they are at the moment, I do like some of the ideas, and having their primary strength be their venom seems like a good idea.

The kinnara still need their musical magic I was thinking about, but before I do that I need to figure out how to do interactions I was looking at a bit of the magic in War & Mythos mod because I keep all my dwarf fortress shit on one flash drive,  and it doesn't seem too difficult to grasp. At worst, I'll make it shitty and come back later and fix it. :p

the Chinese or Japanese inspired civ can get Martial Trance. Maybe one, maybe both, not sure. I want every major faction to have their own unique niche, I feel like martial trance should probably go to the japanese inspired civ, but then what does china get? I'm not entirely sure yet, but I have some ideas.

And then I can maybe try to work in some smaller cultures, I don't know what I'm going to do there yet, that's still too far away to even think about.

And dark fortresses... I don't know. I do want to do a dark fortress civilization, but I really don't have any ideas. A single creature with multiple castes of demons drawing from all the cultures would work, my friend and I sitting down and making our own unique race based on an amalgamation of lore, or even just making more than one dark fortress civilization. Dwarf fortress would feel strange without some equivalent to goblins. I don't know, needs more thought.

As for the primary playable race... I think my friend and I are definitely going to have to just sit down and debate that shit, because I still can't decide on an idea I like.

[wolflance]

Suggetions:

Chinese could be snake-human (human with snake body below the waist, think medusa without the snake hair) if you want to go mythical-shamanistic or Han China. If that spot is taken (by Naga, for example), then dragon-men, if you take the "Descendant of the Dragon" phrase literally. Monkey (Journey to the West) and Panda (WoW) are good, if somewhat cliched, picks.

Other suggestions include stone-men for the terracotta vibes, or tigermen if you want a somewhat more warlike fantasy-China-counterpart (Chinese LOVED to put tiger on literally EVERYTHING related to war, from banner to shield to military uniform to chariot. which brings you something like this. Also one of the most famous fighter unit of China was called...you guess it, Flying Tigers. This is also the unofficial name for Hong Kong's police counter-terrorism unit).

While China had its fair share of feel-no-pain berserking warriors, martial trance, RAGE and reckless bravery are not really characteristic of their view warfare. Instead they were inclined to glorify cold calculating strategy, trickery and guile. Oh, they are also really, REALLY into assassination. You can't get any better than trying to assassinate the First Emperor of China, and having an entire section in the first  Chinese history text (Shiji, written in 94BC) intended to GLORIFY them.

As a side note, a derogatory term used by ancient Chinese and Koreans to refer to Japanese pirates is "Wokou (Wako)" which means "Dwarf pirates" literally. So samurai dwarf is totally legit (maybe), although the original meaning is closer to "midget pirate".

[Sorgklaan]

Thanks. :3

Been doing a bit of the mod on and off, I've been on a massive skyrim binge recently, though.

What my friend and I were talking about was giving the chinese civ some martial arts style abilities with interactions.  My ideas were a nerve pinch that paralyses a limb, and maybe an attack that causes dizziness or vomiting. Possibly their own sort of self buff that increases Intuition and Spatial sense to give that strategic feeling.

I'm still not sure what to do with the japanese civ or which civ(s) I want to be playable. Nothing really appeals to me so far. Can't do shit if I don't get my muse. ; _ ;

[wolflance]

You're welcome.

While Wuxia stuff is good and all, my suggestion is to look up Xianxia for more fantastical stuffs.

[Sorgklaan]

Hey, wanted to leave an update real quick because I'm laying in bed thinking about this.

I got really burned out on dwarf fortress for a couple months, then I did some other things, participated in a game jam with some friends. But  I've been really wanting to get back to this.
 I want to move away from trying to emulate existing cultures as much and instead create a handful of really interesting, unique civilizations that are an amalgam of eastern cultures that I personally enjoy. My current idea is that I want to have 4 or 5 total civilizations, I already have 3 that I'm really happy with still after coming back. After finishing all that and making sure everything works, I'm tempted to release it, let the two or three people who actually give a shit check it out and critique it, then go back and add the minor creatures and monsters and other stuff I wanted to do.

Also, I did learn a shit ton about dwarf fortress modding while working on this. I really want to start a thread devoted to releasing some small, one-off mods. Creatures, megabeasts, civilizations, minor mods. Just a compendium of fun ideas. I think that would be great.

[Max™]

I've been tinkering with a similar sort of thing, and ended up finding some multi-language files but they had a bunch of extra words to remove (really, I don't need a fort named Bukkakehentai, come on) and a few to add and make sure they worked right, I've only got english and japanese though.

Japanese: http://pastebin.com/XQ4UkkdQ

English: http://pastebin.com/rYYtJ79P

I went with samurai dwarves, european knights and crusader themed humans, ninja elves, and mongol goblins.